What Is The Deal With The War Between Reddit And Gawker Media?

Users of Reddit have raised well over a million dollars for charity. Donations have been made for everything from helping children with rare diseases like Lucas (above) [1] to international aid. [2] And Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian is currently touring the country with the Reddit Internet Bus to promote freedom on the internet. [3]

Yet there's also a far darker side to Reddit. Like any online community, there are parts of the site that are unsavory and sometimes downright disturbing. At the start of this year, Reddit was forced to ban a subreddit that included sexually suggestive images of minors after a substantial media backlash. [4] Adult-oriented subreddits are extremely popular, attracting hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Yet it's the slightly more mundane side of the site that first interested Adrian Chen, and it's important to understand what it is about Reddit that interests people like him.

One of the most popular communities on Reddit is IAmA (http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA), a place where users can field questions about their day to day lives. This is a favored place for world-famous names to come and chat to fans. Recent big name IAmA posters include Barack Obama, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Bill Nye. [5] Yet as celebrated as this subreddit is, there can also be a dark side to the otherwise friendly discussions. Take, for example, something that happened the other night. A request [6] was published for Tom Hanks to post an IAmA after a letter he had written made the front page. [7] Hours later, one of Tom Hanks's sons posted an IAmA. [8] During the course of this, Chet Hanks's personal account was discovered, including his posting history. It largely consisted of photos of his bong, other images of drug paraphernalia, and his attempts to arrange meetings with women.

One of the biggest problems with Reddit is the difficulty in verifying the identity of those who post there. (See Which AMA threads on Reddit were proven to be fake?) Adrian Chen chose to explore the side-effects of anonymity on Reddit in a post entitled 'Misguided Internet Vigilantes Attack College Student's Cancer Fundraiser'(http://gawker.com/5751581/misgui...). The gist of the article is that users of Reddit are wrong to question legitimate fundraising attempts, which, on surface value, is an entirely valid point. However, Adrian Chen quickly returned to the IAmA subreddit.

A post named '51 hours left to live' by a user named 'lucidending' drew sympathy from Reddit users. It claimed to be written by a cancer sufferer intending on ending their life by legal means in just over two days. [9] Shortly after the post grew in popularity, Adrian Chen sent this tweet: [10]

Adrian Chen‏ @AdrianChen I have a confession to make: I was lucidending.

Adrian Chen later denied claiming responsibility for the IAmA in a Gawker article named 'Why the Internet Thinks I Faked Having Cancer on a Message Board' (http://gawker.com/5780681/why-th...). This angered many Reddit users, and the backlash was made worse after Adrian Chen posted this image:

Now we return to the contentious issue of pornographic subreddits. One notorious example of this was /r/creepshots. Users submitted stealthily-captured images of women they found attractive. Now, revenge porn and voyeurism isn't new to the internet. But once an image is submitted to Reddit, it has the potential to make a huge impact upon the lives of everyone involved, as we are about to find out.

Many of the images of women on /r/creepshots originated from Toronto, and users on the /r/toronto subreddit were understandably upset at seeing photographs of themselves and their friends on the site. [11] This prompted one of Reddit's most notorious users, 'POTATO_IN_MY_ANUS', to reprimand the suspected photographer.

However, in September, a far more serious issue arose from /r/creepshots. Users had noticed that several images appeared to show students, with sexually-explicit captions attached. These images were found to have been submitted by a substitute teacher from Georgia, who was fired from his position. POTATO_IN_MY_ANUS again posted a severe warning against any content that broke the rules of the subreddit, along with this defense of the community. [12]

People constantly have their pictures taken, without their consent, and used in publications without their knowledge. When you are outside and in public space, you do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy. There is nothing illegal about this subreddit, whatsoever. Creepy, sinister, skin-crawling, and generally downright distasteful... yes. But nothing illegal.

It was likely this controversy that drew Adrian Chen's attention. Here was a far bigger story than anonymous IAmAs, and thus he set about trying to identify one of the most active users of adult-orientated subreddits, one of the newly appointed moderators of /r/creepshots: Violentacrez (Please note that from here on in, I only have the testimony of Reddit users to rely on).

Violentacrez suspected that Reddit's administrators gave his personal information to Adrian Chen, who was preparing to post an article revealing his real-life identity. This is referred to as 'doxxing' in online communities, as a short form of 'posting personal documents online.' Other online communities like 4chan are rife with tales of members spurning the wrath of others and feeling real world effects of their actions, and Reddit administrators are keen to avoid it occurring on their service.

Adrian Chen was reportedly so intent on discovering Violentacrez's real life identity that he took to messaging moderators of other adult subreddits in an attempt to discover more about the user behind one of Reddit's most notorious communities.

In a last-ditch attempt to keep his identity safe, Violentacrez deleted his account. However, this proved ineffective. Adrian Chen published his article, revealing Violentacrez to be a 49 year-old married employee of a Texas financial services company named Michael Brutsch. [13]

/r/creepshots has now been shut down. Vigilante Reddit users issued an ultimatum to one of the senior moderators: Make the Subreddit private or we will reveal your personal identity. It is unclear if this is related to Adrian Chen's body of evidence against Violentacrez.

The ultimatum issued by /r/shitredditsays.

Reddit users have acted angrily to the actions of Adrian Chen, arguing that their personal anonymity is of great importance. As a result of this, links to Gawker Media sites are now blocked on over 60 subreddits including /r/politics, the moderators of which had the following to say about the situation. [14]

We volunteer our time on Reddit to make it a better place for the users, and should not be harassed and threatened for that. We should all be afraid of the threat of having our personal information investigated and spread around the internet if someone disagrees with you. Reddit prides itself on having a subreddit for everything, and no matter how much anyone may disapprove of what another user subscribes to, that is never a reason to threaten them.

As a result, the moderators of /r/politics have chosen to disallow links from the Gawker network until action is taken to correct this serious lack of ethics and integrity.

The controversy caused by Adrian Chen's investigation was partly caused by a post by previously-mentioned user POTATO_IN_MY_ANUS. In it, she shares the screenshots of chatlogs and conversations I have used above, and explains her disgust at the actions of Adrian Chen, labeling him 'snake-like' and accusing him of blackmail. [15] Hours after revealing this, her account was shadow-banned by Reddit admins. An admin named Kemitche posted the following explanation of the ban.

We found the Potato_In_My_Anus Account in violation of several rules. We don't go into specifics on why accounts were banned, but the issues in question fell under items 3 and 4 from the rules page.

A new account named Tiger3636 appeared, claiming to be POTATO_IN_MY_ANUS, and posted a screenshot of a chatlog with a Reddit admin explaining why this user had been banned. [16]

The admin claimed that the screenshot had been edited to remove certain words, and sure enough by increasing the curves on the image on Photoshop, the original text was visible:

The Violentacrez account remains deactivated. Michael Brutsch was fired by telephone after his managers read the Gawker article. He fears that he will struggle to support his disabled wife as he has 3 weeks of savings left to live on.[17]

POTATO_IN_MY_ANUS was accused of lying to Reddit and is banned. She has received international press coverage and fears to reveal her real identity to journalists.